- stopping the violent behavior from ever occurring
- delaying the onset of violent behavior
- reducing the impact of existing violent behavior
- strengthening behaviors that promote emotional and physical well-being, thereby inoculating people from the negative effects of relationship violence
- supporting institutional, community, and government policies that promote the prevention of relational violence
The American Psychological Association recommends instituting violence prevention programs aimed at middle school, high school, and college students that are intended to heighten awareness and reduce rates of date rape. Furthermore, it is important that the prevention programs be repeated since there is considerable evidence that these education programs do produce measurable effects on knowledge and attitudes, though the effects are often not lasting.
Other special-needs populations that the curriculum targeted for prevention programs include immigrants, ethnic minorities, and persons who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Levels of Violence Prevention
Many researchers believe that in order to effectively address the public health problem of intimate partner violence, health professionals, policy makers, educators, and women's advocates must intensify violence prevention efforts. There are three levels of prevention.
Primary prevention of intimate partner violence aims to reduce harmful circumstances before they can produce violence and includes global educational efforts to promote nonviolent interactions and relationships.
Secondary prevention of intimate partner violence is intended to break the pattern of violent behavior before it becomes deeply ingrained. Examples of such efforts are early identification and counseling of first-time offenders to challenge and change behavior as soon as possible after its occurrence. Unfortunately, few programs specifically targeting first-time offenders are available, and programs for chronic perpetrators often alienate first-time offenders who feel they do not belong with severe batterers.
Tertiary prevention of intimate partner violence involves services for victims, counseling, and mandatory treatment of offenders, and may also involve justice interventions including arrest and incarceration.
Primary Prevention Theories
The majority of efforts to date focus on tertiary prevention. However, changing attitudes about intimate partner violence and increasing recognition of violence as a societal problem that affects everyone, not simply the victims, emphasize the need for primary prevention. An example of this effort is the David and Lucile Packard Foundation's support of the "Next Generations: Strengthening Young Families and Communities through Prevention of Child Abuse, Youth Violence, and Domestic Violence" initiative. It aims to contribute "a research and evaluation perspective" to primary prevention efforts, according to Jeffrey L. Edleson, Deborah Daro, and Howard Pinderhughe in "Finding a Common Agenda for Preventing Child Maltreatment, Youth Violence, and Domestic Violence" (Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 19, no. 3, March 2004). The Next Generation initiative is a collaboration with the Family Violence Prevention Fund and the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Prevention.
Neil B. Guterman, in "Advancing Prevention Research on Child Abuse, Youth Violence, and Domestic Violence: Emerging Strategies and Issues," argued that primary prevention programs are still in their infancy (Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 19, no. 3, March 2004). He believes that in order for primary prevention programs to be truly effective, researchers need to do the following:
- formulate a universal definition of family violence to allow comparable measurements of family violence
- design research studies to advance knowledge of how to assess risk for future violence in order to target prevention efforts
- design research studies to advance knowledge on how to intervene in violent relationships to prevent future violence
While the author acknowledges there is often a gap between research into possibly effective prevention strategies and the implementation of those programs, he argued that "these tensions between prevention practice and research… can be viewed as instilling healthy and productive pressures in both directions. For researchers, such pressures mandate that research activities ultimately should be 'in the service of service' …and for practitioners… they mandate that their real world strategies are rigorously grounded, optimally evaluated in an objective fashion."
In Primary Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence (Washington, DC: National Institute of Mental Health, July 2002), researchers Martha Smithey and Murray Straus described the environmental changes and educational approaches they feel will serve to reduce the risk of intimate partner violence for the entire population. Smithey and Straus asserted that "the outcome envisioned as a result of primary prevention is that, although some individuals may continue to be violent, their number will be reduced."
Smithey and Straus feel primary prevention is consistent with the feminist approach to reducing intimate partner violence, since feminists view patriarchy and male dominance as the principle causes of violence. Feminists view societal change that promotes equality between men and women as primary prevention of partner violence. Underlying this view is the belief that the more humane a society becomes, the less likely that its individual members will resort to intimate partner violence.
Smithey and Straus found that while there are few programs specifically aimed at primary prevention of intimate partner violence, some programs offer both primary and secondary types of services. For example, in addition to aiding victims, battered women's shelters may offer community education and other programs to empower women. Furthermore, the presence of shelters in a community sends a clear message that victims have alternatives to remaining in abusive relationships and conveys the community's intolerance of partner violence.
Similarly, the justice concepts of "general deterrence" and "specific deterrence" have primary and secondary prevention objectives. Legal sanctions, such as arrest, prosecution, mandatory treatment, and incarceration, deliver the secondary prevention benefit of deterring an offender from further violence and may also perform a primary prevention function: deterring others from perpetrating violence by warning them of the consequences of their actions. Although there are no data linking legislative changes, such as the enactment of the 1994 Violence against Women Act and the criminalization of wife beating, to changing public attitudes about intimate partner violence, Smithey and Straus argued that the combination of legal reform and widespread access to and availability of services such as hotlines, shelters, and advocacy has resulted in social change.
Smithey and Straus presented eleven criminal justice theories and their implications for primary prevention of intimate partner violence. The following theories have practical applications for prevention programs:
- Deterrence Theory—Intensify formal and informal sanctions for abusive behavior by family, friends, and colleagues.
- Strain Theory—Create more opportunities for education and economic achievement, promote gender equality in the family, and foster realistic expectations of marriage and cohabitation.
- Social Learning Theory—Discourage corporal punishment of children and reduce celebration of violence in the media.
- Control Theory—Strengthen family ties by offering parenting education.
- Moral Justification Theory—Eliminate social approval of violence as a means of supporting moral standards, such as governments' use of capital punishment.
- Control-Balance Theory—Enhance gender equality in the family and reduce social isolation to enable social controls that condemn the use of violence to govern behavior.
- Conflict Theory—Promote economic, social, and political equality and increase access to and availability of marriage counseling.
- Feminist Theories of Criminal Justice—Treat all victims as reliable and truthful and strengthen criminal justice sanctions for intimate partner violence.
- Feminist Theories of Crime/Power-Control Theories—Eliminate male dominance in society and the home.
- Survival Strategy Theory—Increase the availability of escape options, such as shelters and safe houses, for victims of abuse.
- Convergence Theory—Eliminate differences between criminal justice treatment of victims by gender of victims and offenders and reduce cultural support and celebration of violence.
Smithey and Straus also commended the United Nations' leadership role in global primary prevention of partner violence, evidenced by its adoption of the Domestic Violence Resolution in 1985. In its Progress of the World's Women 2000: UNIFEM Biennial Report, UN officials stated that "violence against women and girls constitutes the single most prevalent and universal violation of human rights" (New York: UN Development Fund for Women, 2000).
Despite these promising observations about changing attitudes and reliable data indicating that intimate partner violence is decreasing, Smithey and Straus cautioned that there is no direct evidence demonstrating that declines in violence rates since the mid-1970s have resulted from prevention programs. They offered other factors that may contribute to declining rates of violence, such as an increase of three years in the average age at marriage between 1970 to 2000. Another possible explanation for the decline is that prevention programs have effectively stigmatized partner violence to the degree that there is even greater reluctance, on the part of both victims and perpetrators, to disclose it. Even so, there might be cause for cautious optimism—greater reluctance to admit to abusive behavior indicates that society is less tolerant of violent personal relationships.
Primary Prevention Programs
A number of primary prevention programs are emerging to address the problem of intimate partner violence. Some began during the 1990s and others have been instituted as recently as 2000. Research has not yet evaluated their effectiveness, but researchers and battered women's advocates are hopeful that these initiatives will further reduce public acceptance and tolerance of intimate partner violence. Some examples of primary prevention programs follow.
The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, an agency of the Centers for Disease Control, developed and implemented the Family and Intimate Violence Prevention Program to focus on surveillance, research, evaluation, and training and to fund community-based prevention programs at all levels of prevention. In addition to supporting community-based projects, such as the Milwaukee Women's Center and Georgia's Men Stopping Violence, Inc., the agency also sponsors projects aimed at preventing intimate partner violence in specific populations, such as rural and Native American communities.
The National Crime Prevention Council offers schoolbased prevention programs that train teens to respond to hotline callers and perform peer counseling. The council focuses on violence in teen dating relationships, and its dating violence intervention projects teach boys and girls not to accept violence in their earliest relationships, even before they begin dating. The students are taught how to identify and resolve conflict, recognize abusive behavior, and communicate respectfully with their peers.
The National Advisory Council on Violence against Women was established in 1995 with the goal of eliminating social norms that support and condone violence against women. To achieve this ambitious goal, the council coordinates multidisciplinary efforts involving community leaders and representatives from health care agencies, the military, organized sports, the social welfare system, the justice system, the media, academia, businesses, and religious communities. The council also supports education of children about gender roles and stereotypes that condone violence against women.
The Family Violence Prevention Fund is a national, nonprofit organization that offers primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs. One of their aims is to educate the general public that when people fail to speak out against partner violence, they perpetuate the problem with their silence. To this end, the Fund produced the media campaign "There's No Excuse for Domestic Violence." The fund also provides services for abuse victims, offers community and professional education programs for the public at large, and actively seeks public policy reform. The fund is one of the organizations active in the initiative "Next Generations: Strengthening Young Families and Communities Through Prevention of Child Abuse, Youth Violence, and Domestic Violence."
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